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Carolina Herrera (born María Carolina Josefina Pacanins y Niño on January 8, 1939), Marchioness of Torre Casa, is a fashion designer and entrepreneur who founded her eponymous company in 1980.
Herrera was born in Caracas, Venezuela. Based in New York City since 1981, throughout the 1970s and 1980s she was named one of the best dressed women in the world. Her empire grew rapidly and steadily and she went on to dress Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis for the last 12 years of her life.
Herrera is married to Reinaldo Herrera Guevara, Marqués de Torre Casa, an editor at Vanity Fair magazine, with whom she had two daughters. She was previously married to Guillermo Behrens Tello, with whom she had two daughters as well.
Carolina Herrera is a Goodwill Ambassador and Facilitator for the Intergove...

Elizabeth Patricia Dushku (born December 30, 1980) is an American film actress, who has appeared in several Hollywood movies such as True Lies, Bring It On, and Wrong Turn. She is also well known for her acting on television, such as her recurring appearances on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel as Faith, as well as the main character in the series Tru Calling.
Early life
Dushku was born in Watertown, Massachusetts to Philip R. Dushku (born June 1, 1941), an Albanian-American administrator-teacher in the Boston Public Schools and Judith (Judy) Rasmussen (born March 30, 1942) (a half-Danish-American university administrator and professor at Suffolk University); she was raised a Mormon, the faith of her mother (though she is not actively practicing). She has three older brothers, Aaron,...

Richard Milhous Nixon (January 9, 1913 – April 22, 1994) was the thirty-seventh President of the United States, serving from 1969 to 1974, and the thirty-sixth Vice President of the United States in the administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953–1961). During the Second World War, he served as a Navy lieutenant commander in the Pacific, before being elected to the Congress, and later serving as Vice President. After an unsuccessful presidential run in 1960, Nixon was elected in 1968.
Under President Nixon, the United States followed a foreign policy marked by détente with the Soviet Union and by the opening of diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China. His centrist domestic policies combined conservative rhetoric and liberal action in civil rights, environmental and eco...

Michel Onfray (born January 1, 1959 in Argentan, Orne, France) is a French philosopher. Born to a family of Norman farmers, he graduated with a Ph.D. in philosophy. He taught this subject to senior students at a technical high school in Caen between 1983 and 2002, before establishing the Université populaire de Caen on a free-of-charge basis, for which he wrote a manifesto in 2004 (La communauté philosophique).
After suffering a heart attack aged 28 and being advised to change his diet, Onfray replied that he "preferred to die eating butter than to economize existence with margarine." The episode led him to write his first book, Le Ventre des philosophes, or The Stomach of the Philosophers, about the eating habits of philosophers from Diogenes to Sartre, and how it is reflected in thei...

Roselyne Bachelot-Narquin, generally known as Roselyne Bachelot (born 24 December 1946 in Nevers) is a French politician and Member of the European Parliament for the west of France.
She currently is the French Minister of Health, Youth Affairs and Sport.
She is a member of the Union for a Popular Movement, which is part of the European People's Party, and sits on the European Parliament's Committee on Employment and Social Affairs.
She is a substitute on the Committee on Industry, Research and Energy, a member of the delegation for relations with the Palestinian Legislative Council, and a substitute for the delegation for relations with Israel.
Career
Doctor of Pharmacy
Head of the UMP list for the Grand Ouest region in the European elections on 13 June 2004
Member of ...

Deepika Padukone (Kannada: ದೀಪಿಕಾ ಪಡುಕೋಣೆ; born January 5, 1986) is an Indian supermodel turned actress who appears in Bollywood movies.
Early life and background
Padukone was born to Ujjala and Prakash Padukone on January 5, 1986, in Copenhagen, Denmark. Her family moved to Bangalore, India, when she was only eleven months old. Her parents hail from Padukone village in Kundapura Taluk of Udupi District, Karnataka, India. Her father, Prakash Padukone, was a badminton player of international repute, and her mother is a travel agent. Deepika has a younger sister, Anisha, born in 1991
Padukone attended Sophia High School in Bangalore. She completed her Pre-university studies at Mount Carmel College in Bangalo...

Annie Lennox (born 25 December 1954) is an Oscar, BRIT, Grammy and Golden Globe award-winning Scottish pop musician and vocalist. She is both a solo artist and the lead singer of the duo Eurythmics, often hailed as "The Greatest White Soul Singer Alive" (VH1, 100 Greatest Women of Rock and Roll 1999)
Life and career
Ann Lennox was born in Aberdeen, Scotland. She attended Aberdeen High School for Girls (now Harlaw Academy). She was educated as a classical musician and studied the flute at the Royal Academy of Music in London.
Her time at the Royal Academy was not entirely happy for her. Her flute teacher's final report stated: "Ann has not always been sure of where to direct her efforts, though latterly she has been more committed. She is very, very able, however." Two years later Le...

Omar Sy (born 22 January 1978 (birth time source: Marc Brun, acte 62)) is a French film actor, best known for his duo with Fred Testot, Omar et Fred, and for his role in Intouchables, written and directed by Olivier Nakache and Éric Toledano, which became the second highest grossing French film of all time in the French box office. He received the César Award for Best Actor on 24 February 2012 for his role in Intouchables (beating Jean Dujardin of The Artist).
Selected filmography
Selected filmography
Year Title Role Director Notes
2000 La Tour Montparnasse infernale Taxi driverok Charles Nemes
2002 The Race UNO Seargent Djamel Bensalah
Le Boulet A Malian Guy Alain Berberian and Frédéric Forestier
Samourais Tyson Giordano Gederlini
2003 La Beuze Michel Dembélé François Desa...

Humphrey DeForest Bogart (December 25, 1899 – January 14, 1957) was an American actor. In 1999, the American Film Institute named Bogart the Greatest Male Star of All Time. Playing primarily smart, playful and reckless characters anchored by an inner moral code while surrounded by a corrupt world, Bogart's most notable films include The Petrified Forest (1936), Kid Galahad (1937), Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), The Roaring Twenties (1939), High Sierra (1941), The Maltese Falcon (1941), Casablanca (1942), To Have and Have Not (1944), The Big Sleep (1946), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), Key Largo (1948), In a Lonely Place (1950), The African Queen (1951) (for which he won an Academy Award for Best Actor), The Caine Mutiny (1954), Sabrina (1954), We're No Angels (1955), and The Lef...

Juan Carlos (Spanish pronunciation: ; Juan Carlos Alfonso Víctor María de Borbón y Borbón-Dos Sicilias; born 5 January 1938 (birth time source: Astrodatabank)) was King of Spain from 1975 until his abdication in 2014.
Spanish dictator Francisco Franco named Juan Carlos as the next head of state in 1969. He became King on 22 November 1975, two days after Franco's death, the first reigning monarch since 1931. Soon after enthronement, Juan Carlos introduced reforms to dismantle the Francoist regime and begin the Spanish transition to democracy. This led to the approval of the Spanish Constitution of 1978 in a referendum, which established a constitutional monarchy. Juan Carlos also played a major role in stopping the 1981 coup attempt.
While the reigning King of Spain, Juan Carlos serve...

Hayley Nichole Williams (born December 27, 1988) is an American singer and songwriter. She is the lead vocalist and keyboardist of Paramore.
Life and career
In 2002, at the age of 13, Williams moved from her hometown, Meridian, Mississippi, to Franklin, Tennessee, where she met fellow band members Josh Farro and Zac Farro in school. Shortly after arriving, she began taking vocal lessons with Brett Manning. While still in school, she tried out for a local funk cover band called The Factory where she met Jeremy Davis. In 2005, John Janick, founder of record label Fueled by Ramen, signed a contract with them.
In 2007, Williams appeared in the music video for "Kiss Me" by New Found Glory.
In the 2007 Kerrang! Readers' Poll she finished second to Evanescence's Amy Lee in the "Se...

Roderick David Stewart, CBE (born January 10, 1945 (birth time source: Astrodatabank, Frank Clifford)), is a Scottish / English singer born and raised in London. He describes himself as a "Scottish rock singer", owing to his parentage. He considers himself as a true Scot. He was a member of the The Jeff Beck Group and the Faces. He was also briefly in a band entitled Roddy Rod and the Dynamic Duo with fellow band members Mark McCallister and Sammy Pierce before embarking on a solo career. His wife is model Penny Lancaster.
With his career in its fifth decade, Stewart has achieved numerous hit singles worldwide, most notably in the UK, where his tally of 62 hit singles includes 24 that went Top 10, of which six went all the way to number one.
It has been estimated that Stewart's album...

Christopher "Kit" Harington (born 26 December 1986 in Worcester) is an English film, television and theatre actor.
Early life and education
Harington attended Southfield Primary School between 1992 and 1998. Harington then went on to attend the Chantry High School, in Martley between 1998 and 2003. He attended Worcester Sixth Form College, where he studied Drama & Theatre Studies, between 2003 and 2005.
He graduated from the Central School of Speech and Drama, a constituent school of the University of London, in London, England, in 2008.
Career
Screen
Harington plays the character of Jon Snow in the HBO television series Game of Thrones (2011) alongside Sean Bean. He will appear, with Bean, in the upcoming horror film Silent Hill: Revelation 3D as Vincent.
Theatre
From...

Linda Susan Boreman (January 10, 1949 (birth time source: Astrodatabank, Ivan Martin) – April 22, 2002), better known by her stage name Linda Lovelace, was a pornographic actress in the 1972 film Deep Throat, who went on to leave the pornography industry and became a spokeswoman for the anti-pornography movement.
Deep Throat was notable for beginning a brief fad of porn chic; it was also the inspiration for Bob Woodward's name of his secret Watergate source, W. Mark Felt. Boreman later stated that she regretted her pornographic career and had been violently coerced into pornography by her then-husband, Chuck Traynor; she also renounced her stage name and reverted to using her real name in public. The popularity of the film, however, made her a cultural icon against her will, appearing i...

Faye Dunaway (born January 14, 1941 (birth time source: Steinbrecher)) is an Academy Award-winning American actress.
Early life
Dunaway was born Dorothy Faye Dunaway in Bascom, Florida to Grace April Smith, a homemaker, and John MacDowell Dunaway, Jr., a career army officer. She attended the University of Florida and Boston University, and joined the American National Theatre and Academy in 1962.
Career
Dunaway appeared on Broadway in 1962 as the daughter of Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons. Her first screen role was in 1967 in Hurry Sundown, but that same year, she got the leading female role in Bonnie and Clyde (opposite Warren Beatty) which garnered her an Oscar nomination.
It was in the 1970s that she began to stretch her acting muscles in such films as Three Days of ...

Adam Richard Wiles (born 17 January 1984 (birth time source: Sy Scholfield, Astrodatabank, BC), better known by his stage name Calvin Harris, is a Scottish DJ, singer, songwriter, and record producer. His gold-selling debut album, I Created Disco, was released in 2007 and contained the top ten singles "Acceptable in the 80s" and "The Girls". His second studio album, Ready for the Weekend (2009), reached number one in the UK Album Chart and includes the chart-topper "I'm Not Alone", the UK top five hit "Ready for the Weekend", and the singles "Flashback" and "You Used to Hold Me".
A remix album titled L.E.D. Festival was released in July 2010 as a free album in the August issue of Mixmag. Harris is currently working on his third studio album—due for release in October 2012—which has prod...

Sri Ramana Maharshi (December 30, 1879 – April 14, 1950) was a Hindu Sage. He primarily advocated Self-enquiry (Atma-Vichara) to attain spiritual realization.
Life
Family Background
Sri Ramana was the second of four children of Sundaram Iyer and Azhagammal, and named Venkataraman at birth. He was born in a village called Tiruchuzhi near Madurai in Tamil Nadu, South India on the day of Ardra Darshanam. The other siblings were Nagaswamy (1877-1900), Nagasundaram (1886-1953) and sister Alamelu (1891/92-1953). Venkataraman's father was a pleader who died in 1892 at the age of 47, when Venkataraman was twelve, so he moved to his paternal uncle Subbaiyar's house in Madurai, where he attended Scott’s Middle School and the American Mission High School.
The Awakening
At the age of si...

Olivier Martinez (born January 12, 1966 (birth time source: Paddy de Jabrun, Astrodatabank)) is a French film actor. He became known after roles in several French films, and has also appeared in Hollywood-produced features, including Unfaithful.
Early life
Martinez was born in Paris, France to a working-class family. His father was a Spaniard professional boxer born in Morocco and his mother was a French secretary. He studied at the prestigious CNSAD and began his acting career in his native France in 1990, and quickly achieved a relative success. Martinez was raised Roman Catholic.
Personal life
Martinez previously dated singer/actress Kylie Minogue and was linked to Michelle Rodriguez. Martinez is currently dating actress Halle Berry.
Career
In 1994, Martinez won a César ...

Jean Ferrat (born Jean Tenenbaum, 26 December, 1930 – 13 March, 2010) was a French singer-songwriter and poet.
Ferrat was born in Vaucresson, Hauts-de-Seine. He was the youngest of four children from a modest Jewish family which moved to Versailles in 1935, Ferrat studied at the Jules Ferry College. His Russian father was deported to Auschwitz during the war, where he died. Ferrat dropped out of school to help the family survive.
In the early 1950s he started in Parisian cabaret. After that he has avoided any particular musical style, but remained faithful to himself, his friends and his public.
In 1956, he set "Les yeux d'Elsa" ("Elsa's eyes"), a Louis Aragon poem which Ferrat loved, to music. Its rendition by popular artist André Claveau brought Ferrat some initial recognition...

Armando Christian Pérez (born January 14, 1981), better known by his stage name Pitbull, is a Latin-American rapper. His first recorded performance was from the Lil Jon album Kings of Crunk in 2002, after which he released his debut album in 2004 titled M.I.A.M.I. (short for Money Is a Major Issue) under TVT Records. Since then, he has released two other albums under the label, El Mariel in 2006 and The Boatlift in 2007. He is also the host of his own Spanish-language program on the cable channel Mun2 titled La Esquina (Spanish for The Corner).
Early life and debut album
Pitbull was born of Cuban-American descent and grew up influenced both by the Cuban poet Jose Marti, whose works his parents made him memorize, and the Miami bass genre of hip hop music. He expressed interest in the ...

Patrick Galen Dempsey (born January 13, 1966) is a Golden Globe Award-nominated American actor who first became prominent in Hollywood during the late 1980s. He is also known for his role as neurosurgeon Dr. Derek Shepherd (Dr. McDreamy) on the medical drama Grey's Anatomy. During the 2000s, he also appeared in several film roles, including The Emperor's Club and Freedom Writers.
Height: 5' 10½" (1.79 m)
Early life
An Irish American, Dempsey was born in Lewiston, Maine and grew up in Turner, Maine, the youngest of three children born to Amanda and William Dempsey. Dempsey attended St. Dominic Regional High School for his senior year, where his mother worked as a secretary, but dropped out before he graduated. He was an adept juggler, tying for second in a national juggling competiti...

Dido (born Florian Cloud de Bounevialle Armstrong, December 25, 1971) is an English BRIT Award-winning and Grammy Award-nominated singer and songwriter who performs under a nickname her mother gave her in childhood.
Height: 1m54
Dido's mother, Claire (née Collins), is a French poet and her father, William O'Malley Armstrong (9 November 1938–22 December 2006) was an Irish publisher and former managing director of Sidgwick & Jackson. Informally named after the mythical Carthaginian queen, Dido was educated at Thornhill Primary, City of London Girls' and Westminster School. Because she was born on Christmas Day, in childhood she celebrated, rather in the manner of the British monarch, an "official" birthday on 25 June. At the age of five she stole a recorder from school. At six she atte...

Jonathan Vincent "Jon" Voight (born December 29, 1938) is an Academy Award-winning American actor.
The father of Oscar-winner Angelina Jolie, Jon Voight, also an Oscar-winner and four-time nominee himself, has a long and distinguished career as both a leading man and, in recent years, character actor, with an extensive range. The blond, blue-eyed actor with a boyish face came to prominence at the end of the sixties, with a riveting performance as a would-be hustler in 1969's Best Picture winner, Midnight Cowboy, for which he earned his first Academy Award nomination. Throughout the following decades, Voight built his reputation with an array of challenging roles and has appeared in such landmark films as 1972's Deliverance, and 1978's Coming Home, for which he received an Academy Award ...

Jeremy Lee Renner (born January 7, 1971 (birth time source: the Stanislaus County Office, birth certificate)) is an American actor and musician. Renner appeared in films throughout the 2000s, mostly in supporting roles. He came to prominence in films such as Dahmer (2002) and Neo Ned (2005), and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor for his starring role in the 2009 war thriller The Hurt Locker. The source for his birth time is his birth certificate.
Early life
Renner was born in Modesto, California, the eldest of five children, to Valerie Cearley and Lee Renner. He graduated from Fred C. Beyer High School and attended Modesto Junior College.
Career
Renner has made a career out of playing charismatic anti-heroes. He has portrayed an eighteenth-century vampire, a g...

John Michael Stipe (born January 4, 1960 in Decatur, Georgia) is the lead singer of the American rock band R.E.M. Stipe has become well-known (and occasionally parodied) for the "mumbling" style of his early career and for his complex, surreal lyrics, as well as his social and political activism. Stipe and the other members of R.E.M. are known as pioneers of alternative rock and are credited with having inspired many of the acts that went on to make up the 1990s' alternative music scene including Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Radiohead.
Career
Stipe met Peter Buck, Bill Berry and Mike Mills in 1980 while studying photography and painting at the University of Georgia. They formed R.E.M. that year and issued their debut single, "Radio Free Europe", on Hib-Tone. The song was a college radio succ...

Rafael Edward "Ted" Cruz (born December 22, 1970 (birth time source: Cruz familiy, "San Antonio astrologer Raul Davila, email on July 7, 2014) when Ted Cruz announced he had renounced his Canadian citizenship. Well, MSNBC showed his Certificate of Live Birth on the screen...") is the junior United States Senator for the state of Texas since 2013, and is a member of the Republican Party. He was Solicitor General of Texas from 2003 to May 2008, after being appointed by Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott. He was the first Hispanic Solicitor General in Texas, the youngest Solicitor General in the United States, and the Solicitor General with the longest tenure in Texas history. He was also the first Hispanic, and the first minority to be elected U.S. Senator from Texas. He is one of three Lati...

Logan Wade Lerman (born January 19, 1992) is an American actor, known for playing the title character in the 2010 fantasy-adventure Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief. Lerman began appearing in commercials in the mid 1990s, moving to work in feature films and television in the early 2000s, when he starred in the series Jack & Bobby (2004–2005) and the movies The Butterfly Effect (2004) and Hoot (2006). He gained further recognition for his roles in the western 3:10 to Yuma, the thriller The Number 23, and the comedy Meet Bill, as well as his work in the 2009 films Gamer and My One and Only.
Background
Lerman was born in Beverly Hills, California. His mother, Lisa (née Goldman), works as his manager, and his father, Larry Lerman, is a businessman. He has two siblings, ...

Federico Fellini (January 20, 1920 – October 31, 1993) was one of the most influential and widely revered Italian film-makers of the 20th century and is considered to be one of the finest film directors of all time.
Biography and style characteristics
A unique combination of memory, dreams, fantasy, and desire, Fellini's films are deeply personal visions of society, often portraying people at their most bizarre. The term "felliniesque" is used to describe any scene in which a hallucinatory image invades an otherwise ordinary situation.
His father Urbano (1894-1956) was a travelling salesman and wholesale vendor. In August 1918 he married Ida Barbiani (1896-1984) in a civil ceremony (with the religious celebration the following January). After Federico's birth in 1920, two more child...

Lewis Carl Davidson Hamilton, MBE (born 7 January 1985 (birth time source: Astrodatabank, conflicting sources)) is a British Formula One racing driver from England, currently racing for the Mercedes AMG Petronas team. He is the 2008, 2014 and 2015 Formula One World Champion.
In December 1995, at the age of ten, he approached McLaren team principal Ron Dennis at the Autosport Awards ceremony and told him, "I want to race for you one day ... I want to race for McLaren." Less than three years later McLaren and Mercedes-Benz signed him to their Young Driver Support Programme. After winning the British Formula Renault, Formula Three Euroseries, and GP2 championships on his way up the racing career ladder, he drove for McLaren in 2007, making his Formula One debut 12 years after his initial e...

James Todd Smith III (born January 14, 1968), better known as LL Cool J, is an American hip hop artist and actor. He is best known for romantic ballads like "I Need Love" as well as pioneering pop rap like "I Can't Live Without My Radio", "I'm Bad", "Boomin' System", and "Mama Said Knock You Out" "4, 3, 2, 1". He has also appeared in several films. LL Cool J is one of a few hip-hop stars of his era to sustain a successful recording career for more than two decades. He has released 12 albums and a greatest hits compilation so far, with his next album, Exit 13, set to be released September 4, 2007. The album will be the last for LL's record deal with Def Jam Recordings, a deal which has lasted for over twenty two years, making it the longest single hip hop deal to date. LL Cool J stands for ...

Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, also known by his stage name, Molière (January 15, 1622 - February 17, 1673) was a French playwright and actor who is considered one of the greatest masters of comedy in Western literature. Among Molière's best-known dramas are Le Misanthrope, (The Misanthrope), L'École des femmes (The School for Wives), Tartuffe ou l'Imposteur, (Tartuffe or the Hypocrite), L'Avare ou l'École du mensonge (The Miser), and Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (The Bourgeois Gentleman).
From a prosperous family and having studied at the Jesuit Clermont College (now Lycée Louis-le-Grand), Molière left with a good education to begin a life in the theater. Thirteen years on the road as an actor helped him to polish his comic abilities while he also began writing, combining Commedia dell'Arte elem...

Jean-Michel Basquiat (IPA: ) (December 22, 1960, Brooklyn - August 12, 1988, New York, New York) was an American artist. He gained popularity, first as a graffiti artist in New York City, and then as a successful 1980s-era Neo-expressionist artist. Basquiat's paintings continue to influence modern day artists and command high prices.
Career
Basquiat's mother, Matilde, was Puerto Rican and his father, Gerard Jean-Baptiste, is of Haïtian origin and a former Haitian Minister of the Interior. At an early age, Basquiat displayed an aptitude for art and was encouraged by his mother to draw, paint, and to participate in other art-related activities. In 1977, when he was 17, Basquiat and his friend Al Diaz started spray-painting graffiti art on slum buildings in lower Manhattan, adding the inf...

Betty Marion White Ludden (born January 17, 1922 (birth time source: Stephen Przybylowski, Astrodatabank)), better known as Betty White, is an American actress, comedienne, singer, author, and television personality. With a career spanning over seven decades, she is best known to contemporary audiences for her television roles as Sue Ann Nivens on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Rose Nylund on The Golden Girls. Since the death of co-star Rue McClanahan in 2010, she is now the only living Golden Girl. She currently stars as Elka Ostrovsky in the TV Land sitcom Hot in Cleveland and hosts the practical-joke show Betty White's Off Their Rockers.
White has won seven Emmy Awards (six for acting) and has received 20 Emmy nominations over the course of her career, including being the first woman ...

Anthony Minghella (6 January 1954 – 18 March 2008) was an Academy Award-winning English film director, playwright and screenwriter. He was Chairman of the Board of Governors at the British Film Institute between 2003 and 2007.
Early life
Minghella was born on the Isle of Wight at Ryde, the son of Gloria and Edward Minghella, ice cream factory owners. His father was Italian/Scottish and his mother came from Leeds; her ancestors originally came from Valvori, a small village in the Lazio region of central Italy. Minghella attended Sandown Grammar School and St John's College (Portsmouth). He was a graduate of the University of Hull, where he completed undergraduate and graduate courses, but eventually abandoned his doctoral thesis.
Career
His first piece of produced work was a 1975 ...

Srinivasa Ramanujan Iyengar (Tamil: ஸ்ரீனிவாச ராமானுஜன்) (December 22, 1887 – April 26, 1920) was an Indian mathematician who is considered to be amongst the most talented mathematicians in recent history. With almost no formal training in pure mathematics, Ramanujan made substantial contributions in the areas of analysis, number theory, infinite series and continued fractions.
Ramanujan, born and raised in Erode, Tamil Nadu, India, first encountered formal mathematics at age ten. He demonstrated a natural ability at math, and he was given books on advanced trigonometry by S. L. Loney. He mastered the book by age thirteen, and he even discovered his own theorems. He demonstrated h...

Louis Pasteur (December 27, 1822 – September 28, 1895) was a French chemist best known for his remarkable breakthroughs in microbiology. His experiments confirmed the germ theory of disease, also reducing mortality from puerperal fever (childbed), and he created the first vaccine for rabies. He is best known to the general public for showing how to stop milk and wine from going sour - this process came to be called pasteurization. He is regarded as one of the three main founders of bacteriology, together with Ferdinand Cohn and Robert Koch. He also made many discoveries in the field of chemistry, most notably the asymmetry of crystals.
Early life and biography
Louis Jean Pasteur was born on December 27, 1822 in Dole in the Jura region of France and grew up in the town of Arbois. There ...

Henry Valentine Miller (December 26, 1891 – June 7, 1980) was an American writer and painter. He is known for breaking with existing literary forms and developing a new sort of "novel" that is a mixture of novel, autobiography, social criticism, philosophical reflection, surrealist free association, and mysticism, one that is distinctly always about and expressive of the real-life Henry Miller and yet is also fictional. His most characteristic works of this kind are Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn, and Black Spring. He also wrote travel memoirs and essays of literary criticism and analysis.
Miller was born to tailor Heinrich Miller and Louise Marie Neiting, in the Yorkville section of Manhattan, New York City, of German Catholic heritage. As a child he lived at 662 Driggs Avenue i...

John Stephens (born December 28, 1978) better known by his stage name John Legend, is a Grammy Award winning American soul singer, songwriter, and pianist. His debut studio album, the multiplatinum-selling Get Lifted, was released in late 2004, and features collaborations with rapper and producer Kanye West as well as Snoop Dogg. Get Lifted produced two singles: "Used to Love U" (US top 100, UK top 30) and "Ordinary People" (US and UK top 30). Legend has won five Grammy Awards. Prior to the release of his debut album, Legend's career gained momentum through a series of successful collaborations with multiple established artists. Notably, Legend sang the hooks for hits by Slum Village ("Selfish", also featuring Kanye West), Jay-Z ("Encore"), and Dilated Peoples ("This Way", also featuring K...

LaDonna Adrian Gaines (December 31, 1948 (birth time source: Frank C. Clifford) – May 17, 2012), known by the stage name Donna Summer, was an American singer-songwriter who gained prominence during the disco era of the late 1970s. She had a mezzo-soprano vocal range, and was a five-time Grammy Award winner. Summer was the first artist to have three consecutive double albums reach number one on the U.S. Billboard chart, and she also charted four number-one singles in the United States within a 13-month period.
Born into a devoutly Christian lower middle class African-American family in Boston, Massachusetts, she first became involved with singing through church choir groups before joining a number of bands influenced by the Motown Sound. Influenced by the counterculture of the 1960s, she...

Henri Matisse (December 31, 1869 – November 3, 1954) was a French artist, noted for his use of color and his fluid, brilliant and original draughtsmanship. As a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but principally as a painter, Matisse is one of the best-known artists of the twentieth century.
Born Henri-Émile-Benoît Matisse in Le Cateau-Cambrésis, Nord-Pas-de-Calais, France, he grew up in Bohain-en-Vermandois. In 1887 he went to Paris to study law, working as a court administrator in Le Cateau-Cambrésis after gaining his qualification. He first started painting during a period of convalescence following an attack of appendicitis, and discovered "a kind of paradise" as he later described it. In 1891 he returned to Paris to study art at the Académie Julian and became a student of Willi...

Ratan Naval Tata (born December 28, 1937, in Mumbai) is the present Chairman of the Tata Group, India's largest conglomerate established by earlier generations of his family.
Ratan Tata was born into the wealthy and famous Tata family of Mumbai. He was born to Soonoo and Naval Hormusji Tata, a Gujarati-speaking Parsi family. Ratan is the great grandson of Tata group founder Jamsedji Tata. Ratan's childhood was troubled, his parents separating in the mid-1940s, when he was about seven and his younger brother Jimmy was five. His mother moved out and both Ratan and his brother were raised by their grandmother Lady Navajbai.
He was schooled at the Campion School, Mumbai and graduated from Cornell University in 1962 with a degree in Architecture and Structural Engineering.
Ratan joined...

Haruki Murakami (村上春樹, Murakami Haruki?, born January 12, 1949) is a popular contemporary Japanese writer and translator. His work has been described by the Virginia Quarterly Review as "easily accessible, yet profoundly complex".
Murakami was born in Kyoto in 1949 but spent most of his youth in Kobe. His father was the son of a Buddhist priest. His mother was the daughter of an Osaka merchant. Both taught Japanese literature.
Since childhood, Murakami has been heavily influenced by Western culture, particularly Western music and literature. He grew up reading a range of works by American writers such as Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Brautigan, and he is often distinguished from other Japanese writers for his Western influences.
Murakami studied theater art...

Saint Thérèse de Lisieux (January 2, 1873 – September 30, 1897), or more properly Sainte Thérèse de l'Enfant-Jésus et de la Sainte Face ("Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus and of the Holy Face"), born Marie-Françoise-Thérèse Martin, was a Roman Catholic nun who was canonized as a saint, and is recognized as a Doctor of the Church. She is also known by many as "The Little Flower of Jesus."
Early life
St. Thérèse de Lisieux was born in Alençon, France, the daughter of Louis Martin, a watchmaker, and Zélie-Marie Guérin, a lacemaker. Both her parents were very religious. Louis had attempted to become a monk, but a lack of knowledge of Latin hindered him. Zélie-Marie had tried to become a nun, but was told she didn't have the vocation. Instead, she vowed that if she married, she would give ...

Mary Jane Blige (born January 11, 1971) is an American R&B, soul, and hip hop soul singer, songwriter, occasional rapper, record producer, and actress who has sold over forty million records worldwide. She is widely known as the "Queen of Hip Hop Soul", and has also received over twenty-six Grammy Award nominations for her works, winning six. Early in her career, Blige's highly personal songs and gritty voice earned her comparisons to earlier soul singers such as Chaka Khan and Aretha Franklin; however her artistic evolution and commercial success throughout the years has seen her exert her own influence over a new generation of artists.
Height: 5' 6" (1.68 m)
Music career
In 1988, Blige recorded an impromptu cover of Anita Baker's "Rapture" at a recording booth in a local shopping ...

Edward John David "Eddie" Redmayne (born 6 January 1982) is an English actor and model. Redmayne won the 2010 Tony Award as best featured actor in a play for his performance in Red.
Biography
Early life
Redmayne was born in London, England. He attended Eton College, and went on to study History of Art at Trinity College, Cambridge, from where he graduated with a 2:1 in 2003. He performed with the National Youth Music Theatre (where he was a contemporary of the tenor Nicky Spence).
Acting career
Theatre
Redmayne made his professional stage debut for Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in Twelfth Night at the Middle Temple Hall in 2002. He won the award for Outstanding Newcomer at the 50th Evening Standard Theatre Awards (2004) for his performance in Edward Albee's The Goat, or Who is...

Gilles Deleuze (January 18, 1925 – November 4, 1995) was a French philosopher of the late 20th century. From the early 1960s until his death, Deleuze wrote many influential works on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular books were the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980), both co-written with Félix Guattari. His books Difference and Repetition (1968) and The Logic of Sense (1969) led Michel Foucault to declare that "one day, perhaps, this century will be called Deleuzian." (Deleuze, for his part, said Foucault's comment was "a joke meant to make people who like us laugh, and make everyone else livid.")
Deleuze was born in Paris and lived there for most his life. His initial schooling was undertaken during ...

Peter Thomas Ratajczyk (January 4, 1962 (birth time source: email on April 15, 2013) – April 14, 2010), better known by his stage name Peter Steele, was the lead singer, bassist, and composer for the gothic metal band Type O Negative. Before forming Type O Negative, he had created the metal group Fallout and the thrash band Carnivore.
As the frontman for Type O Negative, Steele was known for his vampiric effect, towering stature, rich bass-baritone vocals, and a dark, often self-deprecating sense of humor. "His lyrics were often intensely personal, dealing with subjects including love, loss, and addiction." Steele credited Black Sabbath and The Beatles as his key musical inspirations.
Early life
Steele was born in Red Hook, Brooklyn into a Roman Catholic family. His father was of ...